Sat 18 March 2017

[…] Yes, it is a wrong idea, slightly racist, perhaps, but
these thoughts happen.

(Someday I'd like to ask each person what they mean by the
word "racist" when they use it … but I'll let you off since
it's Friday. :-)

What is racism?

Well, I am Czech and given the effort of others and our own[1], Czechia is one of the most nationally pure countries in
Europe. Therefore, we usually fancy ourselves not having problem
with racism (“How can we be racists, when there is nobody else
than us here?”)

I also grew up in the two-family house with my uncle and aunt’s
family, both of which had two sons, so only two women in the
whole house were my mom and my aunt.

When I started my post-grad studies in the University of San
Francisco School of Law, the most challenging course we had was
the Contract Law (thus, promissory estoppel). I was very much
ashamed when I found out that I was very surprised that by far
the brightest student in the class had been a young Black lady.
Yes, for both reasons, that she is a lady and that she is Black.

So, yes, racism is in my opinion using stereotypes of group of
people and applying them on individuals (and strengthening such
stereotypes). When I believe that girls or Black people cannot be
smart, or that Gypsies/Roma (that is the closest equivalent of
Blacks in the Central and Eastern Europe) are all lazy and steal.
When the article in the Czech newspapers has headline “Gypsy man
stole something” (that’s the strengthening part). Or here, that
White English professor cannot have Asian lady as anything more
than a nanny.

And not funny thing is how much this relying on stereotypes is
widespread in this nation, which still believes has no problem
with racism. Almost word by word same story as my Black lady in
the Contract class I heard from our former Head Rabbi of Czechia,
except for him it was a black Jewish student of the Hebrew class
(he was forced to emigrate to Israel before 1989). One would
expect that somebody who converts to Judaism would be immune. Oh
well.

I don’t know how much you know about this. There were 13
million inhabitants of Czechoslovakia before the Second World
War, 3 million of them were Germans. Mostly all of them were
expelled from here. German colonizers were living in the area
of the current Czechia since the twelfth or thirteenth
century.